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Check your narrative: It's not abortion vs. adoption. That's what anti-choicers want it to be.
tl;dr: It's pregnant vs. not-pregnant, and then, if not abortion, keep the child or give it up for adoption.
Also: People who get pregnant are selfish no matter what they do, per the Family Research Council.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1130287677058818049.html
In 2015, @gesisson published a study of women with unplanned pregnancies who placed their babies for adoption. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26143075
Through interviews with these women she found that most often, they weren't weighing adoption and abortion against each other, but were first deciding if they wanted to stay pregnant, then deciding if they wanted to parent. Adoption vs. parenting, not adoption vs. abortion.
A second study she led in 2016 reinforced her previous findings that for both women who abort their pregnancies and women who consider adoption, abortion is a pregnancy decision and adoption is a parenting decision, and they're made at separate times. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
You've seen me tweet this before. I've shared these studies many times in many conversations, both online and in person. And when the person I'm talking to is a firm believer in adoption as the answer to abortion, they tend to pick apart the studies.
"Well the original data it's based on is known to be flawed," or "Well that's only a handful of women. What about the rest of them?"
Here's where things get interesting.
Have you heard of the Family Research Council? The Christian fundamentalist political activist group founded by James Dobson and they with a powerful lobbying arm?
From 1997 to 1999, they researched the effectiveness of crisis pregnancy centers deterring women from abortion and encouraging them to pursue adoption over other options, including parenting.
They interviewed 51 women who had made decisions about their unplanned pregnancies. And you know what the found in 1999? The same damn thing @gesisson found almost 10 years later in 2015: Women choose for or against staying pregnant first, THEN make a decision about parenting.
Furthermore, just as @gesisson found through her interviews, women who aborted their pregnancies made that decision early and unwaveringly, and women who chose to continue their pregnancies showed a strong preference for raising their babies, not relinquishing them.
A direct quote from the FRC's study: "Upon suspecting they are pregnant, respondents feel an immediate predisposition either to abort or to carry to term before they ever enter a pregnancy resource center."
This decade-old study from one of the most powerful conservative, faith-based lobbying groups in America affirms multiple times what adoptees like myself and birth mothers have been dismissed—often with hostility—for stating for at least as long:
Abortion is a pregnancy choice, adoption is a parenting choice. They even affirm in their own recommendations: "Adoption advocacy should not be positioned against abortion."
Which is what @gesisson says too: promoting adoption as the alternative to abortion doesn't match women's decision-making OR their feelings about adoption.
One of the most influential fundamentalist lobbies in America actually agrees with what adoptees, birth mothers, our allies, and women's reproductive rights supporters have been openly scorned for saying ourselves for years and years.
But I want to press a little further, specifically into the part about women's feelings about adoption. Because that's where things take a sinister turn. The Family Research Council interviewed 51 women in 1999. @gesisson and her team interviewed 31 almost 10 years later.
Here are women's own words on their feelings about adoption cited in these different studies nearly a decade apart:
"I think if I am going to carry my baby for nine months, I couldn’t give it away."
"If I do not keep the child, [they] will grow up and wonder why I did not."
"If I had given birth...no. I would never give it up for adoption. I wouldn’t let it leave my sight."
"I had too many feelings for her to give [her] to someone I barely knew."
"I would always wonder if I made the right choice."
"The choice was made for me when my daughter was born. When I saw her face and her little hands grabbed my finger, I knew that, for better or for worse, I was going to keep her. I don’t regret it."
That last one is from the Family Research Council's study, which also acknowledges a sense of dignity, self-worth, and positive identity associated with motherhood among the women they interviewed, and relinquishment for adoption representing a loss of all those things.
You know what their study calls that dignity, self-worth, and sense of identity in expectant mothers? "Barriers to adoption." And women's impulses to want to keep their babies instead of relinquishing they correlate with "less mature women."
Did you get that? If you choose to stay pregnant, develop a bond with your future baby during your pregnancy, and decide you'd rather raise it than place it for adoption, you lack maturity. You're also acting selfishly, irresponsibly, and possibly endangering your own child.
They tell counselors to "address the fact that women who keep babies they do not really want are much more likely to neglect or injure them. While children may have been saved from abortion, by staying with unprepared mothers, they may very well live lives of pain and suffering."
Yes, tell your conflicted client that she's at higher risk for neglecting or injuring a child she probably doesn't want anyway, despite 13 pages of compiled evidence in your own report that illustrates the opposite.
These are the foundational messages about unplanned pregnancy that many private adoption agencies are built on, and have been threaded through America's social subconscious through strategically pointed marketing campaigns.
I don't want to link directly to the report that's fed into the steamrolling of both adoptee voices & vulnerable women for the past 10 years, but it's publicly available & you can find it for yourself by Googling "family research council the missing piece." It's the first result.
Through interviews with these women she found that most often, they weren't weighing adoption and abortion against each other, but were first deciding if they wanted to stay pregnant, then deciding if they wanted to parent. Adoption vs. parenting, not adoption vs. abortion.
A second study she led in 2016 reinforced her previous findings that for both women who abort their pregnancies and women who consider adoption, abortion is a pregnancy decision and adoption is a parenting decision, and they're made at separate times. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
You've seen me tweet this before. I've shared these studies many times in many conversations, both online and in person. And when the person I'm talking to is a firm believer in adoption as the answer to abortion, they tend to pick apart the studies.
"Well the original data it's based on is known to be flawed," or "Well that's only a handful of women. What about the rest of them?"
Here's where things get interesting.
Have you heard of the Family Research Council? The Christian fundamentalist political activist group founded by James Dobson and they with a powerful lobbying arm?
From 1997 to 1999, they researched the effectiveness of crisis pregnancy centers deterring women from abortion and encouraging them to pursue adoption over other options, including parenting.
They interviewed 51 women who had made decisions about their unplanned pregnancies. And you know what the found in 1999? The same damn thing @gesisson found almost 10 years later in 2015: Women choose for or against staying pregnant first, THEN make a decision about parenting.
Furthermore, just as @gesisson found through her interviews, women who aborted their pregnancies made that decision early and unwaveringly, and women who chose to continue their pregnancies showed a strong preference for raising their babies, not relinquishing them.
A direct quote from the FRC's study: "Upon suspecting they are pregnant, respondents feel an immediate predisposition either to abort or to carry to term before they ever enter a pregnancy resource center."
This decade-old study from one of the most powerful conservative, faith-based lobbying groups in America affirms multiple times what adoptees like myself and birth mothers have been dismissed—often with hostility—for stating for at least as long:
Abortion is a pregnancy choice, adoption is a parenting choice. They even affirm in their own recommendations: "Adoption advocacy should not be positioned against abortion."
Which is what @gesisson says too: promoting adoption as the alternative to abortion doesn't match women's decision-making OR their feelings about adoption.
One of the most influential fundamentalist lobbies in America actually agrees with what adoptees, birth mothers, our allies, and women's reproductive rights supporters have been openly scorned for saying ourselves for years and years.
But I want to press a little further, specifically into the part about women's feelings about adoption. Because that's where things take a sinister turn. The Family Research Council interviewed 51 women in 1999. @gesisson and her team interviewed 31 almost 10 years later.
Here are women's own words on their feelings about adoption cited in these different studies nearly a decade apart:
"I think if I am going to carry my baby for nine months, I couldn’t give it away."
"If I do not keep the child, [they] will grow up and wonder why I did not."
"If I had given birth...no. I would never give it up for adoption. I wouldn’t let it leave my sight."
"I had too many feelings for her to give [her] to someone I barely knew."
"I would always wonder if I made the right choice."
"The choice was made for me when my daughter was born. When I saw her face and her little hands grabbed my finger, I knew that, for better or for worse, I was going to keep her. I don’t regret it."
That last one is from the Family Research Council's study, which also acknowledges a sense of dignity, self-worth, and positive identity associated with motherhood among the women they interviewed, and relinquishment for adoption representing a loss of all those things.
You know what their study calls that dignity, self-worth, and sense of identity in expectant mothers? "Barriers to adoption." And women's impulses to want to keep their babies instead of relinquishing they correlate with "less mature women."
Did you get that? If you choose to stay pregnant, develop a bond with your future baby during your pregnancy, and decide you'd rather raise it than place it for adoption, you lack maturity. You're also acting selfishly, irresponsibly, and possibly endangering your own child.
They tell counselors to "address the fact that women who keep babies they do not really want are much more likely to neglect or injure them. While children may have been saved from abortion, by staying with unprepared mothers, they may very well live lives of pain and suffering."
Yes, tell your conflicted client that she's at higher risk for neglecting or injuring a child she probably doesn't want anyway, despite 13 pages of compiled evidence in your own report that illustrates the opposite.
These are the foundational messages about unplanned pregnancy that many private adoption agencies are built on, and have been threaded through America's social subconscious through strategically pointed marketing campaigns.
I don't want to link directly to the report that's fed into the steamrolling of both adoptee voices & vulnerable women for the past 10 years, but it's publicly available & you can find it for yourself by Googling "family research council the missing piece." It's the first result.
4 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
